It took a while but finally I’m done. It looks like everyone around me has already passed or abandoned “Machine Learning” MOOC from Stanford University on Coursera. So it was my turn to try this thing out.

Every week I had 2-3 early morning sessions of 2-3 hours each in order to dive deeper into ML. Theory and quizes took around 2-3 hours each week, another 2-3 hours were spent on practical implementation. My fellow guys reported that parts of the theory were already taught for them in the university However it was not the case for me. I clearly knew basic parts of working with vectors however things like linear regression were clearly out of scope in my curriculum. Practical tasks were not very difficult however you can always make some stupid mistake and chase it for hours. There were multiple runs of this course already. This means that all of the possible questions, issues and problems were discussed numerous times. Your just need to look for them.

I would say that the course is pretty balanced during weeks 2-9 and requires a bunch of work to be done and efforts to be applied. The last two weeks are pretty easy.

The course itself is amazing. It has a right combination of getting deep enough to get a sense of things, being not very detailed not to sink in maths and being a good overview of the possible directions in the ML field. There is a lot to learn to become a professional in this field other than this course. However this MOOC definitely serves as an amazing entry point into this area. I really liked the way in which various parts were connected with each other. There was no any part of knowledge given for the sake of it. Every theoretical thing had a really important practical impact. And that’s what I liked the most in the course. It’s very practical and logical. It’s a real fun to see various pieces and ideas glued together to create a real-world output.

Actually it was pretty difficult not to abandon this course for me since it was really intensive. However I’m really happy to have it finished. We already did some application of the knowledge from this course during internal Fitbit hackathon and I guess it’s not the last time it was useful for me.

My huge appreciation to everyone who was involved in creating this course!